Vietnam Encourages Establishment Of Tuna Cooperativesff
20 July 2007
Vietnam The Vietnamese Ministry of Fisheries is drafting a plan to encourage tuna fishermen and processors to join forces for establishing groups or cooperatives in tuna fishing, processing and exporting.
The plan is one of the ways to develop the tuna fishing and processing sector, aiming to enlarge fishing grounds and expand export markets.
At the conference on the sector’s development held in Khanh Hoa Province’s Nha Trang City last week, ministry officials encouraged the establishment of tuna fishing, processing and exporting groups.
In recent years, many ship owners and fishermen from central coastal provinces have joined forces to establish cooperatives, while tuna processors in HCMC and the central region and ship owners have cooperated to increase their fishing and processing capacity. Tran Van Nhan, director of HCMC-based tuna processing firm Viet My International Co., said each year his company had provided fishermen in central coastal provinces with materials and fishing equipment worth about US$3 million, and purchased all their tuna catches.
An official of the fisheries ministry said that the cooperation between enterprises and fishermen is the platform for the ministry to devise plans to support the establishment of tuna fishing groups.
According to the ministry’s statistics, the tuna fishing capacity of the Vietnamese fleet is 50,000-60,000 tons per year, only 10% of the tuna reserves in Vietnam’s territorial waters.
Tuna is one of Vietnam’s key export items, together with shrimp, tra and basa. Vietnamese tuna is exported to 60 countries and territories, including the U.S., Japan and Taiwan as three major markets. Tuna export sales in this year’s first four months reached US$28 million, increasing by 26% from the same period last year. However, due to poor equipment and outdated processing technology, only 30-50% of the tuna catches has been exported to international markets.
In the middle of last year, the fisheries ministry began to carry out a project for developing a storage center and a logistics base for the tuna fishing and processing sector in the central province of Phu Yen. The US$5 million project, covering 10,000 square meters in Tuy Hoa City, was developed with an ODA loan from the Japanese Government. The project aims to help tuna fishing, preserving and processing activities reach international standards on hygiene and safety.
